Altered States intructions

Altered Statesby Don Vance & Sue Bernstein

All answers are 2-letter U. S. state abbreviations. In some cases, more than one state is called for in the answer.

The contest will run until midnight, December 20th. All winners will receive a beautiful, signed, framable certificate. If there is no winner, the contestant(s) with the most correct answers will receive the certificate.

Please submit your answers by email to dlxv -at- aol.com or to subee -at- flash.net with Altered States in the subject line. Please limit your entries to no more than three per week.

Question 1

Traveling west to east through the Panama Canal, the abbreviation of the closest Continental US state navigable from the body of water first encountered when exiting the canal.

Answer: CA
If you examine a close-up map of the Panama Canal, you can see that travelling through it in an easterly direction, you actually enter from the Caribbean Sea side and exit into the Pacific Ocean. The closest navigable state is California.

Answer: DE
The two words we were looking for are facetious and abstemious. Facetious = 6-1-3-5-20-9-15-21-19. Abstemious = 1-2-19-20-5-13-9-15-21-19. Added together = 1225340348304238; the lowest two primes are 2, 43. Added together = 45, 4=D, 5=E, so Delaware.

Question 5

State abbreviations that appear as consecutive letters in the line preceding the line that became the title of an Oscar-winning movie, from a children’s ditty sometimes referred to as William Trimmytoes.

Answer: FL & NE
The variation of the children’s ditty, William Trimmytoes that I learned as a child went like this:
William Trimmytoes, he’s a good man.
Catches hens, puts ‘em in pens
Liar, briar, limberlock
Three geese in a flock
One flew east
One flew west
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
Go home, you dirty dishrag, you jack
From ONE FLEW WEST, we extract Nebraska and Florida.

Question 6

Moving one space at a time in any direction in FIGURE B (vertical, horizontal, or diagonal) without standing on a letter or returning to it, delete the hidden quotation from a book by a noted author, humorist, mathematician and logician. The remaining letters form the abbreviation of a state.

Answer: ID
From Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, the line is, “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” Left over is ID, Idaho.

Question 7

State abbreviation suggested by referring to a map of a different state and eliminating the county with the same name as the surname of a Billy DeBeck creation and eliminating all counties south, east and southeast of that county. (Must have at least 10 miles of common border.) Eliminate the county with the same name as the first recipient of “The Order of Canada” (as a group, rather than an individual) and all counties west, east, south, southeast and southwest of that county. Eliminate all counties that have any of the letters in the middle name of a man nicknamed "Old Brains" as their third letter, except any counties that begin with a 'shh' sound.

Answer: HI
After deducing that the starting state is Kansas and eliminating all of the counties, per the instructions, you should be left with these 10 counties; Cheyenne, Sherman, Wallace, Thomas, Decatur, Sheridan, Gove, Phillips, Rooks, Ellis. Snuffy Smith is the Billy DeBeck creation. “Old Brains” was the nickname for Civil War general Henry Wager Halleck. Shade all these counties in and you get a big H and a big I for Hawaii.

Question 9

State abbreviation that is also the initials of an unwelcome Spartan visitor.

Answer: VT
The setting for the Academy Award winning movie, “In the Heat of the Night” (Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger) was Sparta, Mississippi. There was a sequel called, “They Call Me Mr. Tibbs”. Both movies featured a lead character named Virgil Tibbs (Vermont).